From Imagination to Hallucination: Yoko Ono and the age of AI

<p xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" class="first" dir="auto" id="d4045791e83">Yoko Ono is a well-known conceptual artist, also known for her relationship with John Lennon. They met when Ono visited London from New York in the late 1960s, and later, they moved to New York together. Ono was involved with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The paper charts Ono’s progression in her artistic career in New York and London, with an emphasis on comparing developments in digital art, especially using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, in 2024, a retrospective exhibition of artworks by Yoko Ono was held at Tate Modern in London. This included the 1961–2 work Instructions for Painting, in which Ono specified conceptual images using text, with the idea that the viewer could implement the description in their mind. 60 years later, generative AI can now take such descriptions and generate an image automatically. This paper briefly explores the results of using this approach to augment the original conceptual artwork.